No Longer State-of-the-Art: Crafting a Future for CGI

There is nothing quite like speculating about the future for raising questions about the way we remember the past. The early-to-mid nineteen-nineties can now be identified as a formative, if short-lived, period in the production, circulation, and cultural reception of computer-generated special effects in Hollywood cinema. These were the wonder years--a period in which cgi effects became the focus of intense speculation: not only for cinema audiences, but also for the special effects industry itself. In this, the age of the Hollywood blockbuster, science fiction cinema might have become a forgotten cinema. After all, any claims that its most recent action-attractions might make on our cultural memory are bound to appear tenuous in the face of a mode of exhibition that has made of their public screening an event to be experienced rather than to be remembered. In the early part of this decade, it was nevertheless science fiction cinema, which made the public and social screening of the computer-generated image an occasion for speculation about the future of cinema itself. Much of this speculation focused on the question of how long it would be before digital imaging technologies had totally replaced physical and mechanical effects. Would the production of special effects on-set one day be a thing of the past? Did the wholesale shift from analogue to digital formats in other areas of film production--most notably, sound and editing--portend the future of special effects production? More than half a decade later, it still remains for cultural critics to wonder what will happen next.

In his essay, "The sf of Theory," Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. identifies a need for including a futurological dimension in research into the cultural implications of new technologies. ² It is, he argues, only by attempting to limn the possible directions of evolution, and by clarifying the ethical principles that one wishes to see guiding action, that intellectual work can "maintain a sense of connection with the breakneck acceleration of technological innovation." ³ Although these comments are not specifically directed at film and cultural critics working in the field of digital imaging technologies, they have important implications for this research. In response to Csicsery-Ronay's challenge I want to make identifying some of the ethical questions that are being raised in relation to the changing field of cgi effects production part of this essay's futurological project. This is not, however, to be a futurology in the mode of what Csicsery-Ronay refers to as '"theory-sf." Theory-sf is a mode of theorising that imagines a future which cannot simply be extrapolated from the past. Among the virtuoso stylists of this new futurology, Csicsery-Ronay includes Baudrillard, Haraway, and Deleuze and Guattari: a list which could be expanded to include Virilio and McLuhan. Each of these theorists has sought, at particular moments, to imagine a future that also calls for new ways of conceiving of the past. Each has offered up a kind of historiography--of the sign, of the body, of the assemblage--which is as hyperbolic and estranging as any futurology. And as different as their respective theoretical projects are, each has, in Csicsery-Ronay's words, "attempted to formulate a global theory in what is essentially a lyrical mode." ⁴

The real brilliance of this mode of analysis lies in a gift for metonymy: in the unexpected conjoining and serialising of discourses and events that might not otherwise have been brought together. In a work like Baudrillard's America, or even Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, metonymic associations proliferate and mutate in a conceptual matrix that eschews the kind of frameworks and concepts familiar to most historians of technology. As a result, the narratives of technological convergence offered up by these and other works of theory-sf also appear strangely removed from the materiality of historical phenomena. Because...